Kennedy’s Pub behind Trinity College in Dublin has an intriguing claim to history. Formerly Conway’s, it’s stood at the corner of Fenian and Westland Row since 1850, right across the street from Sweny’s Pharmacy. In this capacity it was immortalized by James Joyce in Ulysses, at the end of the Lotus Eaters chapter, after Leopold Bloom buys a bar of lemon soap at the chemist’s and inadvertently gives a friend a tip on a racehorse: “Bantam Lyons doubted an instant, leering: then thrust the outspread sheets back on Mr Bloom’s arms. —I’ll risk it, he said. Here, thanks. He sped off towards Conway’s corner. God speed scut.” A few pages earlier M’Coy has reported to Bloom that he was “just down there in Conway’s” with Bantam. Bloom never goes. These two remarks represent the pub’s unforgettable role in Ulysses in its entirety.

The proprietors of Kennedy’s do not take this distinction lightly. Photographs and paintings of Joyce grace the walls of the establishment. The menu reprints excerpts of the relevant passages. The waitress will tell you all about the pub’s centrality to the novel, though she confesses she hasn’t read it. (“I’ve been meaning to…”) And on Bloomsday, the annual June holiday commemorating the adventures undertaken by Stephen Dedalus and Bloom, the pub offers free breakfast, live music and performances of the text. It’s enough to make you think that Kennedy’s is a Ulysses-themed pub. Until you walk around the city, and it dawns on you that every pub in Dublin is Ulysses-themed — along with every park, bank, post office, auction house and street corner similarly enshrined in glory by a passing mention in the book.

It isn’t only Joyce who is accorded such respect. The great mundane furniture of Dublin, its inns and restaurants, its cafés and colleges, shimmers with the eminence of proximity to literary fame: throughout its history the city has been close to genius, and it continues to enjoy a contact high. You have never seen so many statues and busts erected in tribute to writers: Brendan Behan on the banks of the Royal Canal, W.B. Yeats in Sandymount Green, George Bernard Shaw outside the National Gallery, Oscar Wilde in Merrion Square. Bram Stoker has a whole park named after him. Jonathan Swift has a monument at St Patrick’s Cathedral, which also houses his grave. And everywhere you look, plaques herald unassuming landmarks: here marks the spot where Bloom helped the blind man cross the road, and so forth.

The great mundane furniture of Dublin, its inns and restaurants, its cafés and colleges, shimmers with the eminence of proximity to literary fame.

In most parts of the world, writers write of home with affection, and those places live on for us, inflected by the voice of the author, in the popular imagination, even while the places themselves remain largely undisturbed. Saul Bellow’s Chicago may be eternal on the page, but as far as I can tell there’s no Augie March sightseeing tour, no bronze likeness of Herzog in Hyde Park — the homage runs one way. In Ireland, it runs in both directions. When an Irish novelist or poet fixes some detail about the country between hard covers, the country responds as though there’s been a consecration, and rushes to revere that which has been so exalted. Indeed the mere patronage of a writer is enough to confer a bar or restaurant lustre. Samuel Beckett favoured Kehoe’s. Toner’s was the only place Yeats ever drank. At the Palace Bar they keep a bounced cheque from Patrick Kavanagh behind glass.

Such gestures are a testament to how seriously the Irish take their literature — would that we all held our nation’s writers in such esteem. This may be attributed in part to civic pride, as the constituents of the country share in the rewards of its achievements; or it may be attributed to the achievements, which are considerable. With Swift and Laurence Stern, in the mid-18th century, the Irish helped determine the shape of the novel; with Joyce, in the early 20th, the Irish redefined it single-handedly. Between Shaw and Beckett, they modernized the theatre (the latter from France); Yeats, a colossus of poetry, led a 19th-century literary renaissance. Iris Murdoch maintained she was Irish until the day she died, though she moved to London when she was three weeks old: another coup, if she counts.

All in all it’s pretty good, the Irish corpus — and doubly so when you consider they’ve only been speaking English for about a quarter of a millennium. Though perhaps, in the way that Vladimir Nabokov’s mastery of English surpassed that of even its finest native speakers, the Irish gained something in coming to the language late, a sensitivity learned rather than inherited. It’s idle to speculate about the character of a national literature — Kavanagh is as different from Yeats, whose work he felt did “not touch life deeply,” as Finnegans Wake is from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — but if there is an affinity, a hallmark of literary Irishness, it must be in the splendour of the writing, the clear blazing brilliance of the voice. Drama, prose, verse: whatever the medium, Irish writers seem to have a peerless facility for the written word.

Perhaps the Irish gained something in coming to the language late, a sensitivity learned rather than inherited.

It emerges that among Irish writers the English language is of the utmost concern. Many of the country’s masterpieces are expressly about language — about how it is used or abused, about its traditions and informing history, about its limitations and its unexplored frontiers. You can see this as far back as 1729, when Swift published his satirical Modest Proposal, demonstrating such supreme command of rhetoric that he weaponized it. The pamphlet, which recommended that the children of Ireland’s poor be “offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune” as “a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food,” derived its power from Swift’s precision, the ferocity restrained and the irony scrupulously rendered. “Those who are more thrifty (as I must confess the times require) may flea the carcass,” he wrote. “The skin of which, artificially dressed, will make admirable gloves for ladies, and summer boots for fine gentlemen.”

Wit of a lighter air was perfected by Oscar Wilde, who could surprise with language, and could make the most mundane words or expressions funny simply by paying them attention. Consider this wonderful exchange from The Importance of Being Earnest. At the end of the second act, Jack and Algernon have been exposed, and sit in Jack’s garden, lamenting their ruin. But in the face of this calamity, Algernon finds time for a quick repast.

JACK: How you can sit there, calmly eating muffins, when we are in this horrible trouble, I can’t make out. You seem to me perfectly heartless.ALGERNON: Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.JACK: I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all under the circumstances.ALGERNON: When I am in trouble, eating is the only thing that consoles me. Indeed, when I am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins.

He is particularly fond of muffins. How to explain why this is one of the funniest sentences ever written for the stage? It has something to do with the soundness of Algernon’s reasoning — that eating muffins does seem a sensible course of relief during times of crisis, and that it won’t do to eat muffins, or anything else, in an agitated manner. More to the point, the word “muffin” is very funny. It wouldn’t be the same joke if Wilde had Algernon eating scones or cakes or sandwiches; he understood, as only a great writer could, the comedy inherent in “muffins,” not as an object so much as a word, on the page or in an actor’s mouth. This strikes at the essence of the language. It betrays not a talent for writing but a supremacy, a virtuosity. Muffins. He was of course a genius.

This emphasis on writing qua writing broadens the purview of language — extends it to not only express ideas, but to explore how ideas are expressed, in what terms and by whom and why. Now this was hardly the domain of the Irish exclusively, but no writer in any language has ever been as concerned as Joyce with what you might call the vocabulary of consciousness, and no writer has ever come as close to transcribing the words that boil and churn inside our heads.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s searching account of an upbringing under the stern rule of Irish-Catholicism, is written in the third-person subjective, and cleaves startlingly close to the mind of its hero, Stephen. “Sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place,” Stephen is a sensitive, innocent and tender child. On the schoolyard he is one morning teased: “—O, I say, here’s a fellow says he doesn’t kiss his mother before he goes to bed.”

Poor Stephen is bewildered, and, wanting to be accepted, laughs when the other boys do. “He felt his whole body hot and confused in a moment. What was the right answer to the question? … Was it right to kiss his mother or wrong to kiss his mother?” Here Joyce drifts inward, closer, so close it feels a cross-section of Stephen’s imagination. The passage that follows is indelible, and unforgettable. “What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say goodnight and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?”

Many of the country’s masterpieces are expressly about language — about its traditions and informing history, about its limitations and its unexplored frontiers.

In At Swim-Two-Birds, the great coming-of-age comedy by Flann O’Brien, the pretentious hero and narrator, an aspiring novelist and student of literature, ponders the definition of a kiss as well. Seeking his friend Brimsley for an opinion on his manuscript in progress, he wanders into the college billiard-hall, where he finds his would-be critic “eating bread from a paper in his pocket and following the play of a small friend called Morris with close attention, making comments of a derisive or facetious character.” Our hero doesn’t know anything about billiards, but elects to watch all the same. “Gob, there’s a kiss,” reports Brimsley of the game. Whereupon our hero interjects: “Extract from Concise Oxford Dictionary: Kiss, n. Caress given with lips; (Billiards) impact between moving balls; kind of sugar plum.” Words matter. Meanings beguile.

At Swim-Two-Birds is a robust parody of the literature of Ireland, as well as a sustained homage to Joyce. Like Joyce, O’Brien cared about language enough to have contempt for its misuse, and At Swim-Two-Birds is intensely skeptical of writing as practised by most writers — that is, without care.

Joyce’s story “A Little Cloud,” collected in Dubliners, is the great depiction of the wrong kind of artistic ambition — an irrepressible yearning to create that leaps ahead in the imagination to glory, without the resolve to do the work. Chandler, an office clerk and family man in Dublin, is off to meet Gallagher, an old friend who is now an esteemed journalist in London, for a drink. The meeting sets his mind on his own accomplishments, or lack thereof, and on the way to the pub he dreams of all he might still achieve. (“He was not so old — thirty-two.”) It is a mark of his gifts that Joyce could prove sympathetic and disdainful in the same lucid description:

He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet’s soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament… He would never be popular: he saw that. … The English critics, perhaps, would recognize him as one of the Celtic school by reason of the melancholy tone of his poems; besides that, he would put in allusions. He began to invent sentences and phrases from the notices his book would get. Mr Chandler has the gift of easy and graceful verse… A wistful sadness pervades these poems… The Celtic note. It was a pity his name was not more Irish-looking.

Chandler will never be a famous poet, obviously. His lot is set; in Dublin, as a clerk, he will remain. Joyce does not begrudge the little man his private fantasies: he pities him, you feel. What he resents is the frame of mind that thinks real artistic expression is a matter merely of temperaments and the weight of a soul, of “putting in allusions.” Writing is hard work. And art is more precious, more important, than whatever trivial renown it might bring. Joyce didn’t dream of writing Ulysses. He was too busy writing Ulysses. A work of this scale, this prodigious brilliance, is chiefly the product of extraordinary toil, of back-breaking exertion.

Ulysses is about language. It’s about the cyclone of the inner voice, and about the raucous din out there, the noise of the street and the school, the pub and the taxi shelter. It parodies bad writing; it parrots thickheaded thoughts, including the prejudices that are the most insidious abuses of the written and spoken word. The bulk of the novel is composed of the banal bricabrac of everyday thinking — the endless rush of “Thursday Friday one Saturday two Sunday three O Lord I cant wait till Monday,” to borrow one such fancy from the mind of Molly Bloom. At its purest and most exalted, the writing surpasses the communicative functions of language altogether. Prose becomes sheer sound. For stretches at a time Ulysses isn’t literary but musical:

Universally that person’s acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitably by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind’s ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature’s incorrupted benefaction.

This 117-word sentence — among my favourites in Ulysses, perversely — kicks off a 40-page chapter that is by far the book’s most difficult. It is the chapter that most plainly lays bare what Joyce wanted to do with the English language, what hopes he had for it, the possibilities he felt it could realize; and it is the chapter that most closely resembles the book Joyce wrote afterward, the gruelling, monumental, impenetrable Finnegans Wake. It’s fitting that the author’s crowning achievement — the most advanced novel ever written, perhaps, and certainly the farthest afield the literature of Ireland ever ventured — would be the one most immersed in language, the one that has given itself over to language entirely. The following passage is, needless to say, sic:

The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since dev-linsdirst loved livvy. What clashes here of wills gen wons, oystrygods gaggin fishy-gods! Brekkek Kekkek Kekkek Kekkek! Koax Koax Koax! Ualu Ualu Ualu! Quaouauh!

This is from page one. Most readers will not make it to page two. It would be unfair to describe Ulysses as “readable,” but it can, with steady application and persistence of will, be read, and read with enjoyment — the register is comic, and with one or two arduous exceptions, the novel really is a delight. Finnegans Wake is unreadable. It must be conquered, vanquished, thwarted; its register is hostile, aggressive, and the only person we can be certain derived pleasure from its company is its author. Obsession with language, with the craft of prose, can at its most extreme tend rather technical. The trick — and this is what makes Irish literature so beloved by the Irish — is the distinction Elizabeth Bowen explains in her introduction to her masterpiece of the Irish countryside, The Last September.

“To suggest — if I have indeed suggested? — that I devised The Last September as a solution of what was to me, in 1928, a main mechanical problem in novel-writing would be untrue,” she writes. “In fact, I should find that blasphemy: this, of all my work, is nearest to my heart.” This novel, she goes on to say, “had a deep, clouded, spontaneous source,” and consequently “brims up with and is rendered to a degree poetic by experience.”

Few writers of her generation were as careful or particular about writing as Bowen: she was a consummate stylist, a technical marvel. But it is that nearness to the heart that animates the prose, and distinguishes the poetic, which is to say the human, from the merely “mechanical.” This spring of feeling is that from which all of the great Irish literature draws. It’s what keeps the heart full while the language is exquisite.